No More Sunday Scaries 👻
How MindsetMods Help Me Transition
As an autistic person, one of my least favorite things is transitions.
Transitioning from home alone, to having my husband home. Transitioning from working to chill time. Transitioning from home to a new environment. Transitioning from my parents house to my in-laws house to my house. Transitioning from full time job to part time job and back.
Transitions - changes - are just super hard for me.
Or, they were.
When I started MindsetMods - mindset modifications - subconscious reprogramming - I knew I wanted to use it to heal myself, but also to help my neurodivergent traits. I’d seen these techniques be used on myself, clients, and practice partners, to transform mindsets, let go of trauma, and experience relief from pain and grief. What I didn’t expect was how simply I could use them to help the multiple things I go through on a daily basis - one being transitions.
This weekend, I really saw these MindsetMods in action - automatically, without me even trying to do it - and came home from vacation without any Sunday scaries.
Thursday afternoon, Garrett and I packed up for our vacation weekend in St. Augustine. Normally, I’d be hyper-fixating on all the things I wanted to do, all the things I wanted to bring, and cleaning my house before I left so I could come home to a clean house.
Instead, I looked at the piles of clean, folded laundry on our bed, and said, “We don’t have to put this away before we leave? Do we?” G smiled and said that we did not. He knows how hard it is for me to let go of control and so when I make a point to do it, he always celebrates it.
We left the clothes on the bed, some dishes in the sink, loaded up the car with whatever we thought of that morning, and headed out on a two hour drive to our AirBnB. We stopped at Buc-ee’s, which was totally overstimulating, but didn’t put us into a meltdown like it might have before, and then unloaded the car at our bungalow on the beach for the weekend.
All weekend, whenever a familiar experience came up, I kept thinking how different I may have reacted before learning subconscious reprogramming. I actively reframed situations that stressed me out before they really stressed me out. I advocated for myself on a number of occasions and pushed myself in situations I normally would have just let myself cower from. Like climbing the lighthouse to the top.
St. Augustine Lighthouse is something like 14 flights of stairs. A year ago, I couldn’t walk more than 2000 steps in an entire day, and would do anything to either stay downstairs or upstairs in my house all day so I didn’t have to climb a single flight. Now, here I am, a St. Augustine Lighthouse climber. And there were a number of times I could have lost my sh*t.
It was SO hot. The real feel was 97 degrees, the lighthouse has no air conditioning and heat rises. By the time we got to the top, I was sweating from heat to toe, couldn’t breath, and doing everything I could to not wipe my face with my crisp white shirt.
Those are all triggers for an overstimulated meltdown for me, and yet, it didn’t happen. I talked to myself. I told G how I was feeling. I took breaks. I made a TikTok. And then I made conversation with another diabetic outside the bathroom before going in, stripping in the stall, and dabbing all the sweat off of me. I was tired, I told G I was tired, and we slowed down.
But I didn’t have a meltdown. And that was huge.
Yesterday, we transitioned from vacationers to being home - and taking care of our Wendy-dog - and normally, this would be overstimulating. I’d be barking orders, trying to clean up the house for the work week, driving myself crazy trying to get all the laundry done, and then getting upset if G and Wendy weren’t following suit.
Instead, my amazing husband unloaded the car, took everything upstairs that needed to go up, and put all the laundry we’d left out away in our closets. I started doing laundry (because that’s an easy task) and took advantage of Wendy being at the dog sitters for another hour, and vacuum-mopped our house - not out of control but because I wanted to. And then we rested. A lot. We enjoyed the end of our weekend and I haven’t felt a Sunday scary at all.
I never expected MindsetMods to have this much of an impact on me. It’s crazy how quickly and efficiently reprogramming your subconscious can affect your life. And MindsetMods can be as big as healing from trauma and as small as getting through a headache. But they all add up into a complete transformation.
I’m going to leave you with this journal prompt for the week:
If you could modify your mindset around anything, what would it be? Big or small? How would that shift change your life?